Thousands Call on City Hall To Confront Police Brutality

Published: August 30, 1997

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As of 1 this morning, 36 of them had been screened for outstanding warrants and released by the 90th Precinct in downtown Brooklyn. City Council members Una Clarke and Annette M. Robinson went to the precinct station at midnight to protest the length of time the screening was taking, said Capt. James Secreto.

''They're very upset,'' Captain Secreto said. ''But there are a lot of people and we're processing them as fast as we can.''

Vladimir Petit-Frere, program director of Good News Radio, which is owned by Mr. Louima's uncle, said Haitian families had been calling the station, worried that relatives who were still being held might be mistreated. Mr. Petit-Frere said that those released complained they had been obeying police orders when the arrests occurred.

But much of the day's rally went without problems.

There were older men in pressed shirts and baseball caps, and parents holding hands with their children, drawn by what had happened to Mr. Louima and their own meditations on life in Haiti and here.

Jeannine Devilme, a New York University nursing student, was marching with her stepmother, her best friend, and three nieces, ages 8, 13 and 16. ''The police have too much authority,'' Ms. Devilme said. ''And they are overusing it.''

Some of the posters the marchers carried attacked Mayor Giuliani -- one called him ''Brutaliani'' -- as well as the police. A number of posters used different words like ''Criminals, Perverts, Racists,'' a play on the C.P.R. (''Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect'') campaign that the Mayor insists will improve community relations. Others, in various ways, depicted the toilet plunger said to have been used against Mr. Louima.

''We are human,'' said Genevieve Lagerre Dazon, a 61-year-old Haitian immigrant. ''And that was not human. Just not human.''

Toilet plungers, the symbol of the brutalization, were a theme throughout the day. Many marchers carried them. One man had a plunger stuck by suction to his bald head, pointing straight up. A few vendors were selling them in the crowd, carting garbage sacks full, at $2 apiece. The Flatbush Hardware store along the route had affixed a plunger to the hand of a six-foot-tall blue plastic Statue of Liberty outside the store and sold a half-dozen to passing marchers. The plunger motif figured heavily, too, in T-shirts worn by marchers and hawked along the way.

Farentz LeFargee, a 21-year-old English major at Queens College who left Haiti when he was 5, said the symbolism was apt. ''Waving these plungers in the face of the police is a reminder of what happened,'' he said. ''The plunger may become a symbol of oppression to Haitians, much as in the same way a lynching rope has become a symbol of oppression to Southern blacks.''

Haitian flags were predominant in the crowd, but there were also flags from other Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago, as well as a Rastafarian banner. Protest organizers said they hoped the march marked a new stage of political activism in the Haitian-American community, which until recently has focused most of its political attention on Haiti.

''It's the loudest and most obvious way to show our number and solidarity,'' said Vladimir Rodney, a member of the Haitian-American alliance, a leading group in the protest. ''Because so many people came out today, Mayor Giuliani has to take notice.''

Photos: A protest of the alleged beating of Abner Louima by the police moved from Brooklyn to City Hall yesterday. (Librado Romero/The New York Times)(pg. 1); Police officers in riot gear arrested people yesterday at Jay and Tillary Streets in Brooklyn after a march against police brutality. The police arrested 110 people on charges of disorderly conduct or obstructing governmental administration, saying many of them had blocked traffic in the area. (William Lopez/The New York Times); In the largest political demonstration in New York City since 1992, marchers streamed across the Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall yesterday. (Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times)(pg. 26)